I’m curious what your experience was like when you started talking to AI safety people after already coming to come of your own conclusions. Eg I’m curious if you think that you missed major points that the AI safety people had spotted which felt obvious in hindsight, or if you had topics on which you disagreed with the AI safety people and think you turned out right.
I think mostly I arrived with a different set of tools and intuitions, in particular a better sense for numerical algorithms (Paul has that too, of course) and thus intuition about how things should work with finite errors and how to build toy models that capture the finite error setting.
I do think a lot of the intuitions built by Bostrom and Yudkowsky are easy to fix into a form that works in the finite error model (though not all of it), so I don’t agree with some of the recent negativity about these classical arguments. That is, some fixing is required to make me like those arguments, but it doesn’t feel like the fixing is particularly hard.
In the other direction, I started to think about this stuff in detail at the same time I started working with various other people and definitely learned a ton from them, so there wasn’t a long period where I had developed views but hadn’t spent months talking to Paul.
I’m curious what your experience was like when you started talking to AI safety people after already coming to come of your own conclusions. Eg I’m curious if you think that you missed major points that the AI safety people had spotted which felt obvious in hindsight, or if you had topics on which you disagreed with the AI safety people and think you turned out right.
I think mostly I arrived with a different set of tools and intuitions, in particular a better sense for numerical algorithms (Paul has that too, of course) and thus intuition about how things should work with finite errors and how to build toy models that capture the finite error setting.
I do think a lot of the intuitions built by Bostrom and Yudkowsky are easy to fix into a form that works in the finite error model (though not all of it), so I don’t agree with some of the recent negativity about these classical arguments. That is, some fixing is required to make me like those arguments, but it doesn’t feel like the fixing is particularly hard.
In the other direction, I started to think about this stuff in detail at the same time I started working with various other people and definitely learned a ton from them, so there wasn’t a long period where I had developed views but hadn’t spent months talking to Paul.